The Giant in the Spiked Helmet

I THINK I saw the caricature first in Munich at the end of July, then in two or three Swiss cities, then in Paris at the end of August, then in Brussels and London ; for it was popular, and the print-shops had it everywhere. It was a map of Europe where the different countries were represented by comical figures, each meant to hit off the peculiarities of the nation it stood for, according to popular apprehension. For Prussia there was an immense giant, one of whose knees was on the stomach of Austria represented as a lank figure utterly prostrate, while the other foot threatened to crush Southwestern Germany. One hand menaced France, whose outline the designer had managed to give rudely in the figure of a Zouave in a fierce attitude ; and the other was thrust toward Russia, a huge colossus with Calmuck dress and features. The most conspicuous thing in the giant’s dress was a helmet with a spike projecting from the top, much too large for the head of the wearer, and therefore falling over his eyes until they were almost blinded by it. The style of the helmet was that of the usual head-dress of the Prussian soldier. The caricature generally was not bad, and I thought the hit at Prussia, half crushed and blinded under the big helmet, particularly good. Throughout her whole history Prussia is either at war, or getting ready for war, or lying exhausted through wounds and recovering strength. In Prussia you find things of pugnacious suggestion always, and in the most incongruous connections. Study the schools, and you will find something to call up the soldier. Study the church, and even there is a burly polemic quality which you can trace back from now to the time when the Prussian bishops were fighting knights. Study the people in their quietest moods, in their homes, among their recreations, indeed, among the graves of those they honor as the greatest heroes, and you will find the same overhanging shadow of war. This predominant martial quality shows itself in ways sometimes brutal, sometimes absurd, sometimes sublime.

I visited Prussia at a time of entire peace, for at my departure I crossed the frontier (or that of the North German Confederation, the whole of which, for convenience’ sake, we will call Prussia) on the very day when King William was shouldering aside so roughly at Ems Benedetti and the famous French demands. The things to which I gave attention for the most part were the things which belong to peace ; yet as I arrange my recollections I find that something military runs through the whole of them. As one’s letters when he has read them are filed away on the pointed wire standing on the desk, so as regards my Prussian experiences everything seems to have been filed away on the spike of a helmet.

Going out early one May morning to get my first sight of Berlin, I stood presently in a broad avenue. In the centre ran a wide promenade lined with tall, full-foliaged trees, with a crowded roadway on each side bordered by stately buildings. Close by me a colossal equestrian group in bronze towered up till the head of the rider was on a level with the eaves of the houses. The rider was in cocked hat, booted and spurred, the eye turned sharp to the left as if reconnoitring, the attitude alert, life-like, as if he might dismount any moment if he chose. In the distance down the long perspective of trees was a lofty gate supported by columns, with a figure of Victory on the top in a chariot drawn by horses. Close at hand again, under the porch of a square strong structure, stood two straight sentinels. An officer passed in a carriage on the farther side of the avenue. Instantly the two sentinels stepped back in concert as if the same clock-work regulated their movements, brought their shining pieces with perfect precision to the “ present,” stood for an instant as if hewn from stone, the spiked helmets above the blond faces inclining backward at the same angle, then precisely together fell into the old position. The street was “ Unter den Linden.” The great statue was the memorial of Frederick the Great. The gate down the long vista was the Brandenburger Thor, surmounted by the charioted Victory which Napoleon carried to Paris after Jena and which came back after Waterloo. The solid building was the palace of iron-gray old King William ; and when the clock-work sentinels went through their salute, I got my first sight of that famous Prussian discipline, against which before the summer was through supple France was to crush its teeth all to fragments, like a viper that has incautiously bitten at a file.

There never was a place with aspect more military than Berlin even in peaceful times. In many quarters tower great barracks for the troops. The public memorials are almost exclusively in honor of great soldiers. There are tall columns, too, to commemorate victories or the crushing out of revolutionary spirit; rarely, indeed, in comparison, a statue to a man of scientific or literary or artistic eminence. Frederick sits among the tree-tops of Unter den Linden, and about his pedestal are life-size figures of the men of his age whom Prussia holds most worthy of honor. At the four corners ride the Duke of Brunswick and cunning Prince Heinrich, old Ziether and fiery Leydlitz. Between are a score or more of soldiers of lesser note, only soldiers, spurred and sabre-girt, — except at the very back ; and there, just where the tail of Frederick’s horse droops over, stand — whom think you ? — no other than Lessing, critic and poet, most gifted and famous ; and Kant, peer of Plato and Bacon, one of the most gifted brains of all time. Just standing room for them among the hoofs and uniforms at the tail of Frederick’s horse ! Every third man one meets in Berlin is a soldier off duty. Batteries of steel guns roll by at anytime, obedient to their bugles. Squadrons of Uhlans in uniforms of green and red, the pennons fluttering from the ends of their lances, ride up to salute the king. Each day at noon, through the roar of the streets, swells the finest martial music ; first a grand sound of trumpets, then a deafening roll from a score of brazen drums. A heavy detachment of infantry wheels out from some barracks, ranks of strong brown - haired young men stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk, neat in every thread and accoutrement, with the German gift for music all, as the stride tells with which they beat out upon the pavement the rhythm of the march, dropping sections at intervals to do the unbroken guard duty at the various posts. Frequently whole army corps gather to manœuvre at the vast paradeground by the Kreuzberg in the outskirts. On Unter den Linden is a strong square building, erected, after the model of a Roman fortress, to be the quarters of the main guard. The officers on duty at Berlin come here daily at noon to hear military music and for a half-hour’s talk. They come always in full uniform, a collection of the most brilliant colors, hussars in red, blue, green, and black, the king’s body-guard in white with braid of yellow and silver, in helmets that flash as if made from burnished gold, crested with an eagle with outspread wings. The men themselves are the handsomest one can see ; figures of the finest symmetry and stature, trained by every athletic exercise, and the faces often so young and beautiful ! Counts and barons are there from Pomerania and old Brandenburg, where the Prussian spirit is most intense, and no nobility is nobler or prouder. They are blueeyed and fair-haired descendants perhaps of the chieftains that helped Herman overcome Varus, and whose names may be found five hundred years back among the Deutsch Ritters that conquered Northern Europe from heathendom, and thence all the way down to now, occurring in martial and princely connection. It is the acme of martial splendor.

“ But how do you bear it all ? ” you say to your Prussian friend, with whom you stand looking on at the base of Bülow’s statue. “Is not this enormous preparation for bloodshed something dreadful ? Then the tax on the country to support it all, the withdrawing of such a multitude from the employments of peace ” Your friend, who has been a soldier himself, answers : “We bear it because we must. It is the price of our existence, and we have got used to it; and, after all, with the hardship come great benefits. Every able-bodied young Prussian must serve as a soldier, be he noble or low-born, rich or poor. If he cannot read or write, he must learn. He must be punctual, neat, temperate, and so gets valuable habits. His body is trained to be strong and supple. Shoemaker and banker’s son, count, tailor, and farmer, march together, and community of feeling comes about. The great traditions of Prussian history are the atmosphere they breathe, and they become patriotic. The soldier must put off marrying, perhaps half forget his trade, and come into life poor ; for who can save on nine cents a day, with board and clothes ? But it is a wonder if he is not a healthy, well-trained, patriotic man.” So talks your Prussian ; and however much of a peace-man you may be, you cannot help owning there is some truth in it. If you buy a suit of clothes, the tailor jumps up from his cross-legged position, prompt and fullchested, with tan on his face he got in campaigning ; and it is hard to say he has lost more than he gained in his army training. Go into a school ; the teacher, with a close-clipped beard and vigorous gait, who has a scar on his face from Königgrätz, seems none the worse for it, though he may have read a few books the less and lost his student pallor. At any rate, bad or good, so it is ; and so, says the Prussian, it must be. Eternal vigilance and preparation ! I went in one day to the arsenal. The flags which Prussian armies had taken from almost every nation in Europe were ranged against the walls by the hundred ; shot-shattered rags of silk, white standards of Austria embroidered with gold, Bavaria’s blue checker, above all the great Napoleonic symbol, the N surrounded by its wreath. This was the memorable tapestry that hung the walls, and opposite glittered the waiting barrels and bayonets till one could almost believe them conscious, and burning to do as much as the flint-locks that won the standards. There was a needlegun there or somewhere for every ablebodied man, and somewhere else uniform and equipments. When I landed in February on the bank of the Weser, the most prominent object was the redoubt with the North German flag. When in midsummer 1 crossed the Bavarian frontier among a softer people, the last marked object was the old stronghold of Coburg, battered by siege after siege for a thousand years. It was the spiked helmet at the entrance and again at the exit ; and from entrance to exit, few places or times were free from some martial suggestion. It is a nation that has come to power mainly through war, and been schooled into the belief that its mailed fists alone can guaranty its life.

I visited a primary school. The little boys of six came all with knapsacks strapped to their backs for their books and dinners, instead of satchels. At the tap of a bell they formed themselves into column and marched like little veterans to the school-room door. I visited a school for boys of thirteen or fourteen. Casting my eyes into the yard, I saw the spiked helmet in the shape of the half-military manœuvres of a class which the teacher of gymnastics was training for the severer drill of five or six years later. I visited the “ prima,” or upper class of a gymnasium, and here was the spiked helmet in a connection that seemed at first rather irreverent. After all, however, it was only thoroughly Prussian, and deserved to be looked upon as a comical incongruity rather than gravely blamed. A row of cheap pictures hung side by side upon the wall. First Luther, the rougher characteristics of the well-known portrait somewhat exaggerated. The shoulders were even larger than common. The bony buttresses of the forehead over the eyes, too, as they rose above the strong lower face, were emphasized, looking truly as though, if tongue and pen failed to make a way, the shoulders could push one, and, if worse came to worst, the head would butt one. Next to Luther was a head of Christ ; then in the same line, with nothing in the position or quality of the pictures to indicate that the subjects were any less esteemed, a row of royal personages, whose military trappings were made particularly plain, It was all characteristic enough. The Reformer’s figure stood for the stalwart Protestantism of the Prussian character, still living and militant in a way hard for us to imagine; the portraits of the royal soldiers stood for its combative loyalty, ready to meet anything for king and fatherland ; and the head of Christ for its zealous faith, which, however it may have cooled away among some classes of the people, is still intense in the nation at large. I visited the best school for girls in Berlin, and it was singular among those retiring maidens even to find the spiked helmet, and this time not hung upon the wall nor outside in the yard. The teacher of the most interesting class I visited—a class in German literature — was a man of forty-five, of straight, soldierly bearing, a gray, martial mustache, and energetic eye. He told me, as we walked together in the hall, waiting for the exercise to commence, that he had been a soldier, and it so happened that among the ballads in the lesson for that day was one in honor of the Prussian troops at Rossbach. Over this the old soldier broke out into an animated lecture, which grew more and more earnest as he went forward ; how the idea of faithfulness to duty had become obscured, but was enforced again by the philosopher Kant in his teaching, and then brought into practice by the great Frederick. The veteran plainly thought there was no duty higher than that owed to the schwarzer Adler, the black eagle of Prussia. Then came an account of the french horse before Rossbach ; how they rode out from Weimar, the troopers, before they went, ripping open the beds on which they had slept and scattering the feathers to the wind to plague the housewives,— a piece of ruthlessness that came home thoroughly to the young housekeepers; then how der alter Fritz, lying in wait behind Janus Hill, with General Leydlitz and Field-marshal Keith, suddenly rushed out and put them all to rout. The soldier was in a fever of patriotism and rage against the French before his description was finished, and the faces of the girls kindled in response. “ They will some time,” I thought, “be lovers, wives, mothers of Prussian soldiers themselves, and this training will keep alive in the home the national fire.”

Admirable schools they all were, the presence of the spiked helmet notwithstanding, and crowning them in the great Prussian educational system come the famous universities. That at Berlin counts its students by thousands, its professors by hundreds. There is no branch of human knowledge without its teacher. One can study Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Assyrian arrow-head inscriptions. A new pimple can hardly break out on the blotched face of the moon, without a lecture from a professor next day to explain the theory of its development. The poor earthquakes are hardly left to shake in peace an out-of-the-way strip of South American coast or Calabrian plain, but a German professor violates their privacy, undertakes to see whence they come and whither they go, and even tries to predict when they will go to shaking again. The vast building of the University stands on Unter der Linden, opposite the palace of the king. Large as it is, its halls are crowded at the end of every hour by the thousand or two of young men, who presently disappear within the lecturerooms. Here in past years have been Hegel and Fichte, the brothers Grimm, the brothers Humboldt, Niebuhr, and Carl Ritter. Here now are Lepsius and Curtius, Virchow and Hoffman, Ranke and Mommsen, — the world’s first scholars in the past and present. The student selects his lecturers, then goes day by day through the semester to the plain lecture-rooms, taking notes diligently at benches which have been whittled well by his predecessors, and where he too most likely will carve his own autograph and perhaps the name of the dear girl he adores, — for Yankee boys have no monopoly of the jackknife. I met face to face some of the great scholars who give glory to the University to-day,— Lepsius, one Sunday afternoon in his garden, a hale, straight man of sixty, with an abundance of white hair brushed away from a fine forehead, a ruddy, healthful, smooth-shaven face, and the keen eyes looking from behind spectacles that have learned so shrewdly to decipher the difficult record Sesostris and the Pharaohs have left on obelisk and pyramid ; Ranke, the great historian of the Popes, of the Reformation, of Prussia, still diligent in his seventy-fifth year. I saw in his study Theodor Mommsen, historian of Rome, a man great like Niebuhr, and in the front rank of the scholars of all time. He came forward, a thin figure, from his books and manuscripts, to greet the stranger, hardly past fifty, and yet bent as if with the weight of great erudition ; a pale cheek, a dark eye, not quenched at all by study ; a profusion of black hair, which has in part turned gray, over a good head. His voice seemed thin and weak, though under excitement it becomes strong enough. The meagre form spoke of constant toil and seclusion, and one could see what it cost to be great in his direction. His manner was somewhat stiff, but polite. He paid a high tribute to the historian Bancroft, Minister at Berlin, saying it was not often men so worthy and scholarly were found in diplomatic positions. He spoke with interest of the honor about to be done to Bancroft by the University of Göttingen. Fifty years ago, the ambassador received there his degree of Doctor. A deputation of professors was to come to Berlin from Göttingen, a grand festivity to be held, and the degree to be renewed. He spoke cordially of America, in spite of the Cæsarism expressed in his history ; and when I hinted at some of our shortcomings, said hopefully, the future belonged to us, and all would come right in time. In the midst of the talk three pretty children came laughing and dancing into the room to bid their father good night. They were plainly on the most familiar terms with him. He kissed them with pride and pleasure, the light in his fine eyes becoming playful. While the sunbeam was shining, I left the student’s dusty den, with its disordered piles of books, its heaps of manuscripts, its casts and plates of Roman antiques.

Where can one find the spiked helmet in the midst of the scholastic quiet and diligence of a German university? It is visible enough in more ways than one. Here is one manifestation. Run down the long list of professors and teachers in the Anzeige, and you will find somewhere in the list the Fechtmeister instructor in fighting, master of the sword exercise, and he is pretty sure to be one of the busiest men in the company. To most German students, a sword, or Schläger, is as necessary as pipe or beer-mug; not a slender fencing-foil, with a button on the point, and slight enough to snap with a vigorous thrust, but a stout blade of tempered steel, ground sharp. With these weapons the students perpetrate savageries, almost unrebuked, which strike an American with horror. Duels are of frequent occurrence, taking place sometimes at grounds and on days regularly set apart for the really bloody work. The fighters are partially protected by a sort of armor, and the wounds inflicted are generally more ghastly than dangerous ; though a son of Bismarck’s is said to have been nearly killed at Bonn a few years ago, and there is sometimes serious maiming. Perhaps one may say it is nothing but very rough play, but it is the play of young savages, whose sport is nothing to them without a dash of cruel rage. The practice dates from the time when the Germans wore wolf-skins, barbarians roaring in their woods. Perhaps the university authorities find it too inveterate a thing to be done away with ; perhaps, too, they feel, thinking as it were under their spiked helmets, that after all it has a value, making the young men cool in danger and accustoming them to weapons. We, after all, cannot say too much. Often our young American students in Germany take to the schlager as gracefully and naturally as game-cocks to spurs. The most noted duellist at one of the universities last winter was a burly young Westerner, who had things at first all his own way. A still burlier Prussian from Tübingen, however, appeared at last, and so carved our valiant borderer’s face, that hereafter with its crisscross scars it will look like a well-frequented skating-ground.

To crown all, the schools and University at Berlin are magnificently supplemented in the great Museum, a vast collection where one may study the rise and progress of civilization in every race of past ages that has had a history, and the present condition of perhaps every people, civilized or wild, under the sun. In one great hall you are among the satin garments and lacquered furniture of China; in another it is the seal-skin work of the Esquimaux stitched with sinew. Now you sit in a Tartar tent, now among the war-clubs, the conch - shell trumpets, the drums covered with human skin of the Polynesians. Here it is the feathery finery of the Caribs, here the idols and trinkets of the negroes of Soudan. There too, in still other halls, is the history of our own race ; the maces the Teutons and Norsemen fought with, the torcs of twisted gold they wore about their necks, the sacrificial knives that slew the victims on the altars of Odin ; so, too, what our fathers have carved and spun, moulded, cast, and portrayed, until we took up the task of life. In another place you find the great collection made in Egypt by Lepsius. The visitor stands within the fac-simile of a temple on the banks of the Nile. On the walls and lotus-shaped columns are processions of dark figures at the loom, at the work of irrigation, marching as soldiers, or mourners at funerals,— exact copies of the original delineations. There are sphinx and obelisk, coffins of kings, mummies of priest and chieftain, the fabrics they wore, the gems they cut, the scrolls they engrossed, the tomb in which they were buried. Stepping into another section, you are in Assyria, with the alabaster lions and plumed genii of the men of Nineveh and Babylon. The walls again are brilliant, now with the splendor of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar ; the captives building temples, the chivalry sacking cities, the princes on their thrones. Here too is Etruria revealed in her sculpture and painted vases ; and here too the whole story of Greece. Passing through these wonderful halls, you review a thousand years and more, almost from the epoch of Cadmus, through the vicissitudes of empire and servitude, until Constantinople is sacked by the Turks. The rude Pelasgic altar, the sculptured god of Praxiteles, then down through the ages of decay to the ugly painting of the Byzantine monk in the Dark Ages. So too the whole history of Rome; the long heave of the wave from Romulus until it becomes crested with the might and beauty of the Augustan age ; the sad subsidence from that summit to Goth and Hun. There is architecture which the eyes of the Tarquins saw, there are statues of the great consuls of the Republic, the luxury of the later Empire. You see it not only in models, but sometimes in actual relics. One’s blood thrills when he stands before a statue of Julius Cæsar, whose sculptor, it is reasonable to believe, wrought from the life. It is broken and discolored, as it came from the Italian ruin where it had lain since the barbarian raids. But the grace has not left the toga folded across the breast, nor is the fine Roman majesty gone from the head and face, — a head small, but high, with a full and ample brow, a nose with the true eagle curve, and thin, firm lips formed to command ; a statue most subduing in its simple dignity and pathetic in its partial ruin. And all this is free to the world as the air of heaven almost. No fee for admission ; the only requisitions, not to handle, orderly behavior, and decent neatness in attire. Here I saw too, when I ascended the steps between the great bronze groups of statuary as I entered, and again the last thing as I left, the spiked helmet on the head of the stiff sentinel always posted at the door.

The German home is affectionate and genial. The American, properly introduced, is sure of a generous welcome, for it is hard to find a German who has not many relatives beyond the Atlantic. There are courteous observances which at first put one a little aback. Sneezing, for instance, is not a thing that can be done in a corner. If the family are a bit old-fashioned, you will be startled and abashed by hearing the “prosits ” and Gesundheits ” from the company, wishes that it may be for your advantage and health sonorously given, with much friendly nodding in your direction. As you rise from the table it is the oldfashioned way, too, to go through with a general hand-shaking, and a wish to every one that the supper may set well. The Germans are long-lived, and almost every domestic hearthstone supports the easy-chairs of grandparents. Grandfather is often fresh and cheerful, the oracle and comforter of the children, treated with deference by those grown up, and presented to the guest as the central figure of the home. As the younger ones drop off to bed and things grow quieter, grandfather’s chair is apt to be the centre toward which all tend, and, of course, the old man talks about his youth. Here are the reminiscences I heard once at the end of a merry evening, and at other times I heard something not unlike : “ Children and grandchildren and guest from over the sea, when I was a boy, Prussia was struggling with the first Napoleon ; and when I was eighteen I marched myself under Blücher beyond the Rhine. Sometimes we went on the run, sometimes we got lifts in relays of wagons, and so I have known the infantry even to make now and then fifty miles a day. Matters were pressing, you see (sehen Sie ’mal). At last we crossed at Coblentz, and got from there into Belgium the first days of June. We met the French at Ligny, — a close, bitter fight, — and half my battalion were left behind there where they had stood. We were a few paces off, posted in a graveyard, when the French cavalry rode over old Marshal Vorwärts, lying under his horse. I saw the rush of the French, then the countercharge of the Prussian troopers, when they missed the General, and drove the enemy back till they found him again ; though what it all meant we never knew till it was over. Then, after mighty little rest, we marched fast and far, with cannon-thunder in our ears in a constant mutter, always growing louder, until in the afternoon we came at a quickstep through a piece of woods out upon the plain by Waterloo, where they had been fighting all day. Our feet sucked in the damp ground, the wet grain brushed our knees, as our compact column spread out into more open order and went into fire. What a smoke there was about La Haye Sainte and Hogoumont, with now lines of red infantry, or a column in dark blue, or a mass of flashing cuirassiers, hidden for a moment, then reappearing ! It was take and give, hot and heavy, for an hour or so about Planchenoit. A ball grazed my elbow and another went through my cap ; but at sunset the French were broken, and we swept after the rout as well as we could through the litter, along the southward roads. We were at a halt for a minute, I remember, when a rider in a chapeau, with a plume and a hooked nose underneath, trotted up, wrapped in a military cloak, and somebody said it was Wellington.” Grandfather will be sure to be at a white heat before he has finished, and so, too, his audience. The athletic student grandson, with a deep scar across his cheek from a schälger cut, will rise and pace the room. The Fräulein, his sister, to whom the retired grenadier has told the story of the feather-beds at Weimar, will show in her eyes she remembers it all. “ Yes, friend American ! ” breaks in the father of the family, “ and it all must be done over again. Sooner or later it must come, a great struggle with France ; the Latin race or the Teutonic, which shall be supreme in Europe ? We are ready now ; arsenals filled, horses waiting, equipments for everybody. Son Fritz there has his uniform ready, and somewhere there is one for me. Donnerwetter ! If they get into Prussia, they ’ll find a tough old land-storm ! Only let Vater Wilhelm turn his hand, and to-morrow close upon a million trained and wellarmed troops could be stepping to the drum.” It was a long evening at the end of June. Napoleon was having the finishing touches put to the new Opera House at Paris, thinking, so far as the world could tell, of nothing more important than how many imperial eagles it would do to put along the cornice. King William was packing for Ems, designing to be back at the peaceful unveiling of his father’s statue the first week in August. Bismarck was at his Pomeranian estate, in poor health, it was said, plotting nothing but to circumvent his bodily trouble. In less than a month full-armed Prussia was on the march. I could understand the readiness, when I thought of the spiked helmet I had seen in the Prussian home that quiet summer night.

The German Friedhof or buryingground, has never the extent or magnificence of some American cemeteries. Even near the cities it is small and quiet, showing, however, in the wellkept mounds and stones there is no want of care. Every old church, too, is floored with the memorial tablets of those buried beneath, and bears upon walls and columns monuments in the taste of the various ages that have come and gone since the church was built. Graves of famous men, here as everywhere, are places of pilgrimage, and here as everywhere to see which are the most honored tombs, is no bad way of judging the character of the people. Among the scholars of Germany there have been no greater names than those of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, brothers not far apart in the cradle, not far apart in death, who lived and worked together their full threescore years and ten. They were two wonderful old men, with faces — as I saw them together in a photograph shown me by Hermann Grimm, the wellknown son of Wilhelm — full of intellectual strength, and yet with the sweetness and innocence of children. They lie now side by side in the Matthäi Kirchhof at Berlin, in graves precisely similar, with a lovely rose-bush scattering petals impartially on the turf above both, and solid twin stones at their heads, meant to endure apparently as long as their fame. Hither come a large and various company of pilgrims, — children who love the brothers Grimm for their fairy-tales, young students who have been kindled by their example, and gray old scholars who respect their achievements as the most marvellous work of the marvellous German erudition. The little North German city, Weimar, is closely associated with the great literary men of the last hundred years. Here several of them accomplished their best work under the patronage of an enlightened duke, and finally found their graves. An atmosphere of reverend quiet seemed to hang over it as I walked through its shaded streets, — streets where there is never bustle, and which appear to be always remembering the great men who have walked in them. In the burying-ground in the outskirts I found the mausoleum of the ruling house, a decorated hall of marble with a crypt underneath in which are the coffins. The members of the Saxe-Weimar family for many generations are here ; the warlike ancestor with his armor rusting on the dusty lid, grand-duke and duchess, and the child that died before it attained the coronet. But far more interesting than any of these are two large plain caskets of oak, lying side by side at the foot of the staircase by which you descend. In these are the bones of Goethe and Schiller. The heap of wreaths, some of them still fresh, which lay on the tops, the number on the coffin of Schiller being noticeably the larger, showed how green their memory had been kept in the heart of the nation. I was only one of a great multitude of pilgrims who are coming always, their chief errand being to see the graves of these famous dead within the quiet town. In the side of the Schloss Kirche, in the city of Wittenberg, is an old archway, with pillars carved as if twisted and with figures of saints overhead, the sharpness of the cutting being somewhat broken and worn away through time. It is the doorway which rang loud three hundred years ago to the sound of Luther’s hammer as he nailed up his ninety-five theses. Within the church, about midway toward the altar and near the wall, the guide lifts an oaken trap-door and shows you beneath the slab which covers Luther’s ashes. Just opposite, in a sepulchre precisely similar, lies Melanchthon, and in the chancel near by, in tombs rather more stately, the electors of Saxony that befriended the reformers. A spot worthy indeed to be a place of pilgrimage ! attracting not only those who bless the men, but those who curse them. Charles V. and Alva stood once on the pavement where the visitor now stands, and the Emperor commanded the stone to be removed from the grave of Luther. Did the body turn in its coffin at the violation ? It might well have been so, for never was there fiercer hate than went from them toward him and him toward them. For three centuries the generations have trooped hitherward, more often drawn in reverence, but sometimes through very hatred, a multitude too mighty to be numbered. But there is a grave in Prussia, where, if I mistake not, the pilgrims are more numerous and the interest, for the average Prussian, deeper than scholar or poet or reformer call out. The garrison church at Potsdam has a plain name and is a plain edifice, when one thinks of the sepulchre it holds. Hung upon the walls are dusty trophies ; there are few embellishments besides. You make your way through the aisles among the pews where the regiments sit at service, marching from their barracks close by, then through a door beneath the pulpit enter a vault lighted by tapers along the wall. Two heavy coffins stand on the stone floor,— the older one that of Frederick William I., that despot, partially insane, perhaps, who yet accomplished great things for Prussia ; the other that of his famous son, Frederick the Great, whose sword cut the path by which Prussia advanced to her great power. On the copper lid there formerly lay that sword, until the great Napoleon when he stood there, feeling a twinge of jealousy perhaps over the dead leader’s fame, carried it away with him. Father and son lie quietly enough now side by side, though their relations in life were stormy. About the great soldier’s sleep every hour rolls the drumbeat from the garrison close by. The tramp of the columns as they come in to worship jar the warrior’s ashes. The dusky standards captured in the Seven Years’ War droop about him. The hundred intervening years have blackened them, already singed in the fire of Zorndorf, Leuthen, and Torgau. The moth makes still larger the rent where the volleys passed. The spiked helmet is even here among the tombs ; and schooled as the Prussians are among the din of trumpets and smoke of wars, no other among the mighty graves in their land holds dust, in their thought, so heroic.

The Prussian church is a true church militant. There is an element of defiance and sternness in German Protestantism, brought down from old times, which never drops away. Many a German church has on its walls marks of the rapine of the Thirty Years’ War. Many of the pulpits from which in the Reformation such hot resistance was preached are occupied by the ministers who give tone to the nation’s present religious life. As churches and pulpits are the same, so the words of the preachers have much of the ancient spirit. Over the result of the Romish council I heard again and again last summer outbursts of most energetic protest. It was the fierce polemic fire of the fathers of Geneva and Dort, which has not even begun to smoulder in the lapse of time. In the midst of the public square in the old city of Worms, where Luther appeared at the famous diet, is the magnificent Luther memorial, one of the finest and most costly pieces of modern art, to erect which treasure was poured in from all Protestant Germany, in great part from Prussia. In the first place there is a broad square substructure of granite, along the border of which are set colossal statues of princes and scholars, and allegorical figures of cities famous in the Reformation. Coming from the outside to the centre you have the great heart of the thing. Five statues of bronze are grouped together on a base of polished sienite. Four of these represent the great forerunners, Huss, Wyckliffe, Peter Waldus, and Savonarola, the latter figure being particularly startling in its lifelike presentment. In the midst of all, from among the princes whose power shielded him, the scholars who held up his hands, and the mighty martyrs who died that the fulness of time might come and he and his work live, towers the colossal Luther. The statue is ten feet and a half high. A scholar’s gown drapes it to the feet, one of which is advanced. His clenched right fist is on the cover of a Bible he holds in his left arm. The head is bare, the face upturned, the lips parted. That giant Luther face ! And beneath are cut the words which he uttered before the diet, —the heroic shout, some tone of which may have been borne in the air as far as the spot where the memorial now stands : “ Here I stand ; I cannot do otherwise ; God help me. Amen.” It is very, very grand, commemorating gloriously a most manly and consecrated warfare. To erect it coincided thoroughly with the spirit of Protestantism in Germany to-day. Two or three years since, at its dedication, an immense multitude came together, one of the largest Protestant gatherings of modern times, who, as they stood before the group, seemed to recognize in the spirit that filled the faces the antagonistic fire that burned in themselves. The speeches were fulminations full of the old thunder that fell on willing ears. There stood the bronze which the best genius of the land had made almost to live, — the princes with their swords, the brows of the scholars grown spare with earnest controversy, the hand of Savonarola eloquent with denunciation, and towering highest the great shoulders of Luther. There were the parted lips, the lines ploughed by spiritual struggle, the rugged brows, the clenched fist resting on the Bible, the figure braced back for a mighty shock, as if he saw in the air before him the range on range of mighty prelates and helmeted rulers, and in the background the stake and fagots. The masculine, resolute hostility toward the old enemy embodied in the memorial the vast multitude recognized as something that belonged to itself to a degree unabated ; and so it is that one finds even the Prussian faith crowned with the spiked helmet.

To see Prussian recreations one must visit the pleasure-gardens. Every village has one at least, and the cities abound with them. The German summer as compared with ours is cool and wet, and with our in-door habits such an exposure as the Germans practise could not be safely encountered. Every day in summer, however, when the weather is at all tolerable, the German family is more likely than not to be for some hours, perhaps until late in the evening, in the open air. The most famous gardens in Prussia are at the little city of Potsdam, just out of Berlin. They belong to the royal family, and contain several palaces and villas, but seem to be held by the sovereign only in trust for the benefit of the people. There is no weed in the beds, no break in the smooth, solid box massed into glistening hedges. Even the thickets are trained to be graceful, without losing the charm of wildness. Every breath is perfume. Everywhere bees hum and birds sing. In the early summer there are deep, sweet, intermittent warblings, the notes of the nightingales with which the gardens are filled. Perfect taste, perfect luxuriance, princely lavishness ! hither throng the people, for all is freely thrown open. Nothing is required but orderly behavior, and a respect for such regulations as are necessary to keep the beauty unimpaired. Children play on the velvet lawns. Lovers sit in the arbors. The plain man of the people is there with his wife in company. The husband carries the baby, the wife leads the youngster just learning to walk. The rest of the wholesome, whiteheaded brood troop after. On one side you hear mirth or music, on the other the gurgle of the beery flood in which all Germany is steeped to the ears, poured out almost as lavishly as the water of the fountains.

In one of my visits to Potsdam I stood before the central door of the New Palace in these gardens. A cord supported on slight posts was drawn through a portion of the garden, running across green and thicket toward the palace, at the steps of which it finally ended ; the light barrier serving as a hint to the public, it was desired the space beyond should be kept private. Looking over the cord into the part re-

served, I saw a groom in livery leading a pony which drew a low easy vehicle along the walk toward a side door of the palace. There it stopped, and presently a lady rather short and stout, in a light summer dress and mantle, with an easy hat, came out of the palace and took her seat in the vehicle. The appearance of the lady was so simple I did not think of her being a distinguished personage, until people near me said it was the Crown Princess. Just as the lady took her seat a group of pretty children came running from the trees near, accompanied by two or three ladies and a gentleman, their governesses and a tutor. One little princess in white ran to the carriage with a bouquet which she pressed upon her mother. The whole group bounded up, a prince running forward to pat the pony. The Crown Princess welcomed all with a most motherly smile on her good, not handsome face ; and I felt that all the creditable things I had heard of her might easily be true, — of her kindness to the poor, her interest in important reforms, her pursuit of difficult branches of study, with all her maternal cares. But now in the midst of the peace and beauty of the garden stood forth—what but the spiked helmet, in the shape of a tall athletic man in the fullest vigor of his years, in an undress uniform of dark green set off with red ! His face was fair, the lower part covered with a thick brown beard, the eyes blue, the whole mien quiet, simple, manly. He wore on his head a plain red-banded cap, which he touched with soldierly dignity to the tutor and the governesses as they passed by him with the children into the palace. He stood erect and quiet a moment by the carriage ; then presently the pony moved forward, still led by the groom. The lady spread her parasol. The soldier walked at her side, keeping pace with the pony’s progress, until presently the party disappeared among the garden-walks. It was the Crown Prince Frederick William. Seven hundred years ago his ancestor Conrad, the younger son of a family of some rank, but quite undistinguished, riding down from the little stronghold of Hohenzollern in Swabia, with nothing but a good head and arm, won favor with the Emperor Barbarossa and became at last Burggraf of Nuremberg. I saw the old castle in which this Conrad lived and his line after him for several generations. It rises among fortifications the plan for which Albert Dürer drew, with narrow windows in the thick masonry of the towers, the battlements worn by the pacing to and fro of sentinels in armor, and an ancient linden in the court-yard, planted by an empress a thousand years ago it is said, with as green a canopy to throw over the tourist to-day as it threw over those old Hohenzollerns. Conrad transmitted to his descendants his good head and strong arm, until at length becoming masters of Baireuth and Anspach, they were Margraves and ranked among important princes. Their seat now was at Culmbach, in the great castle of the Plessenburg. I saw one May morning the gray walls of the old nest high on its cliff at the junction of the red and white Main, threatening still, for it is now a Bavarian prison. The power of the house grew slowly. In one age it got Brandenburg, in another the great districts of Ost and West Preussen ; now it was possessions in Silesia, now again territory on the Rhine. Power came sometimes through imperial gift, sometimes through marriage, sometimes through purchase or diplomacy or blows. From poor soldiers of fortune to counts, from counts to princes, from princes to electors, and at last kings. Sometimes they are unscrupulous, sometimes feeble, sometimes nobly heroic and faithful; more often strong than weak in brain and hand. The Hohenzollern tortoise keeps creeping forward in its history, surpassing many a swift hare that once despised it in the race. I believe it is the oldest princely line in Europe. There is certainly none whose history on the whole is better. Margraf George of Anspach-Baireuth was perhaps the finest character among the Protestant princes of the Reformation, without whom the good fight could not have been fought. When Charles V. besieged Metz in the winter (which, with Lorraine, had just been torn from Germany by the French), and was compelled by the cold to withdraw, it was a Hohenzollern prince, one of the first soldiers of the time, who led the rearguard over ground which another Hohenzollern, Prince Frederick Charles, has again made famous. Later, in Frederick the Great, the house furnished perhaps the firmest hand that ever held a royal sceptre.

Standing on the University steps, looking across Unter den Linden, it is a common sight to see the gray head of old King William, as he rises from his table for a minute, and looks out good-naturedly on his subjects passing in the street. He is every inch a king in his look and bearing. His face has in it benevolence and force, and few men have a finer physique. He is of towering stature, the red facings of his uniform expanded by a most noble chest. He bows with stately courtesy to return the salute of his humblest subject. It is not his brain, to be sure, that is planning now such greatness for Prussia, nor his that has guided the enormous forces of his kingdom, as they fall in thunderbolts, now upon Austria, now upon France. He is, moreover, too much of an autocrat to suit an American, perhaps a bit of a bigot; but there is a sound heart in the king’s breast and a fair share of the soldierly energy of his ancestors. It is not yet time to say what the son will be. In the garden at Potsdam he seemed like a man full of reserved power. In those days he was so quiet and devoted as a father and husband, that he was in danger of ecoming unpopular, as too weakly domestic. But hardly a month from that time, the easy man I had seen keeping pace with the pony, sheltered by his wife’s parasol, at Wörth and Weissembourg had applied nitro-glycerine to French prestige. Yet he is not a soldier through choice. “ I do not like war,” he is reported to have said in the midst of his victories ; “and if I am ever king, I shall never make war.” He has other than warlike accomplishments. It was my good fortune to exchange a few words with and touch the hand of the great Greek scholar Curtius, who had the care of his education in his youth. The prince has the culture that comes from classic training, as well as the knowledge and discipline necessary to guide affairs.

The morning after the news of the rupture with France I stood under an archway in the palace of the Austrian Emperor at Vienna. Through the archway passed a street of the city ; for the immense building occupies such a position that ways are broken through it to accommodate the public traffic. One of the brilliantly dressed guards always on duty came running and passed the word to a comrade that something was about to happen, I could not understand what. Immediately after, an open carriage, drawn by four fine gray horses, drove rapidly up. It passed so near me, that, as I stood in the archway, I was obliged to press close against the wall to save my feet from the wheels. Four men in uniform sat in the carriage, one of whom, on the back seat, I recognized at once, from his pictures, as the Emperor Francis Joseph II. He was wrapped in a military cloak, for the morning was rainy. His face was good, but refined rather than strong; his figure rather slight. The impression made was of elegance, not vigor. The carriage rolled forward.

I heard instantly after the roll of drums, and caught sight through the archway of a line of troops in uniform of blue and white, with the flag of Austria in the midst of them, drawn up to salute. The Emperor disappeared within the palace to arrange no doubt the terms of that neutrality which it was understood within the week he would observe during the struggle.

A week later I had reached Munich, and went one evening to the royal opera house to hear the “ Rheingold ” of Wagner. The building is one of the most perfect of its kind in the world. The scene was brilliant, as the great decorated spaces were filled. Suddenly the crowd sprang to their feet, waving handkerchiefs, and shouting “ Hoch ! Hoch ! ” the German cheer. It happened to be the evening of the day Bavaria decided to take part in the war. The king had just entered, and I was about to see an ovation rendered by the enthusiastic audience, who were carried away with German feeling. Looking upward from my place, I saw in the centre of the circle of seats the royal box, heavily draped with curtains, and in front, a slender, black-haired young man of twenty-five, in plain, dark attire, who bowed gracefully this side and that, acknowledging the homage. Presently the fine orchestra crashed in with the national hymn. I found it quite impossible to resist the contagion, and before I knew it fairly was shouting “ Hoch ! ” as if I were the most loyal of subjects. The king’s appearance corresponded with what is said of his character. He was slender and graceful, but with no sign of force ; a patron of the fine arts, and taking more pleasure in the exercise of his delicate taste than in the rougher work of ruling.

Compare these sovereigns of the two prominent states of Southern Germany with the stalwart figure at the window, in Unter den Linden, and the masculine, self-contained soldier biding his time at Potsdam. They are all good types, perhaps, of the lands they rule ; and if so, Prussia is worthy of the leadership to which she is advancing. In the cathedral of Speyer stand the statues of the mighty German Kaisers, who six hundred years ago wore the purple, and, after their wild battle with the elements of disorder about them, were buried at last in its crypts. They are majestic figures for the most part, idealized by the sculptor, and yet probably not far beyond nature ; for the imperial dignity was not hereditary, but given to the man chosen for it, and the choice was often a worthy one. They were leaders in character as well as station, and it is right to give their images the bearing of men strong in war and council. I felt that if the ancient dignity was to be revived in our own day, and the sceptre of Barbarossa and Rudolph of Hapsburg to be extended again over a united Germany, there had been few princes more worthy to hold it than that stately Hohenzollern whom circumstances have forced into wearing the spiked helmet against his will.

In speaking of this great people so as to give the best idea of them in a short space, I have seized on what has seemed to me the most salient thing, and described various phases of their life as pervaded by it. The fighting spirit is bred in their bones. They are a nation of warriors almost as much as the Spartans, and stand ready on the instant to obey what almost any instant they may hear, the tap of the drum calling to arms. Such constant suggestions of war are painful. The spiked helmet is never an amiable head-dress ; “ but,” says the representative Prussian, “ there is no helps for it. We have been a weak people wedged in between powerful, unscrupulous neighbors, and have had a lifeand-death struggle to wage almost constantly with one or the other of these, or all at once. And in what way is our situation different now ? Is Russia less ambitious ? How many swords has France beaten into ploughshares ? What pruning-hooks have been made from the spears of Austria ? Let us know on what conditions we can live other than wearing our spiked helmets, and we will embrace them.” It is not an easy matter to argue down your resolute Prussian when he turns to you warmly, after you have been crying peace to him, and talks in this way. Perhaps the best hit you can make at him is to say, “Your neighbors can make out as bad a case against you as you against them.”

Perhaps it is a necessity, since the world is what it is, that Europe should still be a place of bloody discord. America, however, is practically one, not a jarring company of nations, repeating the protracted agony of the Old World. We have no question of the “balance of power” coming up in every generation, settled only to be unsettled amid devastation and slaughter. We can grow forward unhindered, with hardly more than a feather’s weight of energy taken for fighting from the employments of peace. America stands indeed a nation blessed of God ; and there is nothing better worth her while to pray for than that a happier time may come to her giant brother over the sea; that the strength of such an arm may not always waste itself wielding the sword ; that the sensibilities of such a heart may not be forever crushed or brutalized in carnage that forever repeats itself; that the noble head may some time exchange the spiked helmet for the olive chaplet of peace.

J. K. Hosrner.